


we are the crossroads

by mysteriesofloves



Category: Gossip Girl (TV 2007)
Genre: Affairs, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Season/Series Finale, but boy is there a lot of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25176625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysteriesofloves/pseuds/mysteriesofloves
Summary: I would’ve been a completely different person if I’d let myself love you.
Relationships: Dan Humphrey/Blair Waldorf
Comments: 37
Kudos: 213





	we are the crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> Going back to my roots of post-series fic and this one is... _a lot._ This is maybe my favourite thing I’ve written and the time it took to complete it reflects that. The tags speak for themselves!
> 
> Trigger warnings for: minor mentions of body image issues, talk of pregnancy related trauma, mentions of domestic abuse/some rape/dub-con. You know I never let Chuck off easy.

If it doesn't go away by the time I turn thirty / I made a mistake and I'll tell you I'm sorry

\- Gracie Abrams, _21_

* * *

The magazine lays on the marble counter, a coffee ring stained on the open page. 

Breakfasts are the worst for Dan, getting dragged out of bed to sit at a table with his not-friends and pretend he doesn’t want to douse himself in scalding hot coffee the entire time. He prefers dinners, where they’re slotted in between the reservation and the closing time. But breakfasts, when they happen, only happen on Sundays, and only happen here. High ceilings, large windows letting in the light, white pillars at the staircase, waxed floors ( _waxed fucking floors_ ). It all reminds him of church, and may as well be, seeing as he was married here. He hasn’t been to church in years (he remembers the last time, but doesn’t dwell on the thought) but every time he steps inside this place, he says a small prayer. 

He pats down his pockets, swears to himself when he doesn’t feel the weight of his phone, preparing to go on a scavenger hunt through this mausoleum of a house for it. He walks through the wide arch of the kitchen entrance, all evidence of tedious breakfasts past already cleared away. The tap in the kitchen sink runs, and he almost doesn’t see her standing there, her dress and pale skin making her blend in with the counters and cabinets. But he can’t miss the brown hair, the jewelled clip fastened to the back of her head glinting in the morning light.

She hardly looks up, dishcloth in hand, washing orange juice out of champagne glasses.

“I think I left my phone in here somewhere.” 

Her nose lifts, gestures loosely to her right. He sees it on the counter, nods and smiles but she doesn’t see it.

And then there’s the magazine next to it, open to a page on a closing exhibit for the Whitney Biennial. He runs his finger over the words while he reads, then looks up, brows furrowed.

“Are you going to this?”

She glances at the magazine, then at him, then back to the glasses.

“I’m on the board,” Blair says plainly.

“Right,” he says. “Forgot.”

He pockets his phone, walks back through the wide arch and heads to the foyer. He hears the tap turn off. He doesn’t turn around. 

* * *

He hears her laugh before anything, still familiar even though he‘s hardly heard it in years. She’s with a group of women, all slightly older, dressed in the usual decorum, all the jewels and pearls that old money can buy against the backdrop of modern art. 

“Hey, stranger.”

Tilted head, furrowed brows, lips pursed in the smallest bit of a smile. Familiar, too - and even more infrequent. 

“Humphrey,” she says slowly. “What are the odds?”

He matches her, curious tilt and small, fond smile. “Mind showing me around?”

She wrings her hands, turning back to the group, seemingly unsure of what to do, then turns on her heel down the corridor. He follows her. 

“I read your piece in the New Yorker,” she says - an op-ed on being surrounded by the city’s wealthiest people juxtaposed to his upbringing. “It was insightful. Funny. I don’t normally find politics funny.”

His mouth feels dry. He hadn’t named any of them, but it wouldn’t take much insight to figure out the _faux-democrats who’s actions in their personal lives speak far louder than their donations to certain campaigns_ , probably had something to do with her husband. 

“They’re making it a permanent position,” he says. The walls are lined with canvases, and although most of them are abstract, it feels like there’s faces between the strokes. But he’s not really looking, eyes stuck on brown curls. 

“Wow,” she says. “Moving downtown. We’ll be neighbours.”

“We can have lunch,” he says. “You, me, and Richard Brody.”

She laughs, her nose wrinkling, baring teeth. They round the corner, met with a sculptural installation in the middle of the room, tulle suspended over metal armatures like golden waves. He walks up to it, bending slightly to study it. Blair makes her way around it, does the same, her head tilting, their eyes meeting through the fabric. He circles around to her side as she steps back, the only sound in the room the click of her heels, conversations distant, separated by walls and canvases. 

He stops in front of her, her lips puckered in a held-back smile. They’re standing too close for whatever it is that’s happening here. He knows it and he doesn’t back away. Neither does she. Little freshwater pearls stick out from behind her hair, little bits of shimmer on her lips. A jukebox kicks in from somewhere, _shoo-bop shoo-bop_ pulsing in his ears. Maybe it’s coming from outside, or maybe it’s just in his head. 

“Fall collection looks good,” he says, and he knows too, that his voice is too hushed. Her eyebrows shoot up, and she laughs again, that face scrunching laugh where her mouth opens up.

“I walked by Saks the other day,” he says. “Saw it in the window.”

“That’s the winter collection, but nice try.”

She looks past him suddenly, and steps back.

“Flora,” she says, and he turns, steps back as well. “I got off track. This is Daniel Humphrey. He’s an old friend.”

The woman nods stiffly, like she could really care less, and Dan takes a few more steps back, pretends to find an interest in a painting on the opposite wall. He hadn’t been sure if he was going to come, not even when he spent twenty five minutes looking for parking, not even when he’d smoked half a cigarette on the curb to calm his nerves, not even when he’d stepped foot inside.

“I’m very in demand,” Blair says, stepping back up next to him. “I have to make my rounds.“

“I can wait,” he says, although he’s not sure for what. She nods, touches his arm lightly then withdraws.

He winds through the maze of white walls, not paying much attention to anything. He gets caught up in idle small talk with the husband of someone he’s supposed to know, who he supposedly met at a party not long ago, who he was probably too drunk or too tired or too bored to remember. As Blair’s hand comes on his elbow again, the husband turns his attention to her, same placated smile he’d used on Dan. _You know my husband Arthur as well, don’t you?_

Blair smiles, exchanges pleasantries, and Dan watches her. She looks different, like a mother - not _her_ mother, just _a_ mother - and he imagines the repercussions such a comment would have.

“Arthur Campbell’s a friend of yours?” she says, that same puckered smile, like she’s just waiting to laugh again. 

“I have no idea who that was,” Dan says, and there it is - that laugh. 

“I’m all done,” she says. “Have you seen everything you wanted to see?”

“Everything I came for,” he says, and then, before he can stop himself, “Let’s get coffee. Right now, if you’re not busy.”

Those pursed lips again, like she’s completely amused by him. 

“I’m not,” she says. “You’re buying.”

He doesn’t think she’s stopped smiling the whole walk. Her cheeks round and rosy, nose red from the cold, that broken jukebox in his head with that tinny voice crackling through, _It seems like a mighty long time..._

Dan is walking a dangerous line. 

There’s so much to say and Dan can’t find the words for any of it. He remembers the last time they spoke - just the two of them with no wiretap of spouses listening in - but he doesn’t dwell on this thought, either.

( _I did everything I could, Blair, but I couldn’t make you love me._ Not long after she’d married, long enough before he did. Late at night and drunk and surprised she even picked up the phone. _You never really thought we were equals, did you? You knew you could do better than me._

_I’m not a character in your book, Humphrey. You can’t just expect me to want the ending you wrote for me._

_I hope you’re fucking happy in your glass castle. That’s all I want. I just want you to be happy_.)

This is the him he wants to show her - Not the him that’s hollowed out and hardened, stone cold inside, the corpse of his former self covered over in silk sheets, left behind in that long-sold penthouse. The him he wants to show her is a him that’s happy, a friendly smile and a smart joke that rolls smooth off the tongue. A him that is fine without her. A him that doesn’t love her anymore. A him that doesn’t exist. 

And to think he was only just getting the city back, clawing it from the rigid hands of that former self who saw her at every streetlight. This was their home - all of theirs, all his not-friends - always had been, born and bred. But it was hers above all else, she had made that known and it was burned into the back of his hand, there every time he reached out to press the button at a crosswalk.

He was getting it back - other than the walk down Fifth, a detour because of a sidewalk closure, that resulted in her name plastered across the windows ( _her_ name, not those other four letters tacked on that taste bitter in his mouth). He’d even walked past the steps - the _steps_ as in the _shrine_ \- without doubling over and vomiting all over the concrete. He had almost gotten it back. And then. 

It’s cramped, both of their legs crossed under the table, their feet resting against each other.

“It’s past three,” he says. “Who picks up Henry?”

“The driver,” she says, stirring her coffee although there’s no need to. She takes a careful sip. “He still sleeps with that doll you gave him,” she says. “He pretends that he doesn’t because he thinks he’s too old for it.“

(Dan got Henry a vintage Cabbage Patch doll for his fifth birthday. It was - of course - less for the kid and more for Blair. A truce, maybe, or a sacrament. Henry had ripped open the box and hugged the thing like it was his oldest, dearest friend. Dan had laughed, pressed a small kiss to his small cheek. He could feel Chuck’s jaw tense from across the room. Serena’s hollowed out smile bearing into the back of his neck. Blair had excused herself to the bathroom, and when he walked past the shut door, he swore he heard crying.)

“I will have to get back soon, though.” she says. “The floor waxers should be finishing up.”

Dan can’t help but laugh. “The opulence is astounding.”

“Dan Humphrey in an office job is astounding,” she says, the smallest nudge of her foot against his. She was probably only shifting.

 _We can’t all have our names on the door,_ he thinks, dropping the charade for a moment, the self that thinks all kinds of uncharitable thoughts left in its place. 

“Promised myself I’d have a stable job at thirty,” he says.

“And you’re not one to break promises.” 

His head tilts back into its ever-curious position. There’s an implication in her tone he’s not able to decipher. 

“They dug up that story I wrote junior year,” he says. “Makes a pretty good follow up when you marry the muse.”

Blair’s cup hovers at her mouth. “I never read it.”

_So now it’s a game._

“You think you can talk to someone about getting me on that board?” he says. 

She leans forward on her elbows, tongue between her teeth. “Takes a hefty donation. Maybe that muse you married could lend it to you.”

Dan smiles. _There she is._

“Anyway, you look well.” She says it with careful consideration, like she hasn’t seen him in years. Maybe because she hasn’t. 

“So do you, Waldorf.” When his foot nudges hers, it’s on purpose. 

“This was nice,” he says when they’re back out in the cold. “Do you wanna split a cab?”

“I think we’re going opposite ways,” she says, and he remembers his car parked blocks back. They must’ve walked right by it.

“It was nice running into you,” she says, eyes on the street, hand raised. “Maybe you’ll run into me again, say, Thursday at the Met?”

“I’ll see if I’m available,” he says. She smiles. _So now it’s a game._

* * *

He looks straight ahead as he takes the steps two at a time. And to think he was just getting it back. And then.

He sees him, tall for his age, head tilted up, up, up, staring at the high arched ceiling. He’s the reflective image of Chuck, his little Narcissus.

“I’m sorry,” Blair says. “He had a stomach ache and I was around the corner from the school and -“

“It’s okay,” Dan says. “Of course, it’s - is he better now?”

“It’s fake,” she says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “He’s just being difficult.”

Dan takes a step forward, and she follows, her small frame not effectively blocking his path, but the echo of her heels enough to stop him in his tracks.

“We’re going to have dinner with his father in the city tonight,” she continues conversationally, like he’s one of her women at the gallery she speaks to using her hands and a plasticine smile. “It’s nice to go out as a family when we have the time. Henry just talks his father’s ear off. He tells him everything.”

Dan takes that instinctive step back. Her spine sticks straight up, a power line, like if he touched her now she would spark.

“I’m going to see Rebecca at Film Forum next weekend,” she says. “I wouldn’t be opposed to saving a seat.”

Blair knows that Serena is in California next weekend. Dan knows that Chuck is in Sydney. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel like a game anymore.

* * *

She steps out of a cab. She’s not as dressed up as he had become used to seeing her, no pearls or jewels, just a long black coat over a red dress, the bottom of it whipping in the wind, the ghost of a girl he once knew.

“Dan,” she says, like she’s acknowledging that it’s really him, that he really came. Her mouth turns down. “Your hand.”

Wrapped in a bit of white bandage, unappealing ooze of ointment seeping through. He’d burned it on the stove this morning, the water he was boiling forgotten, evaporated into mist. She adds, dryly, “Aren’t you too old to be getting into fights?”

He tries to think of something funny to say in return but comes up empty. Everything feels a little mean. He shrugs, gestures his good hand at the doors. 

It feels like they’re back at the beginning, like he should take the seat in the aisle opposite her. But she settles into a seat in the back, two empty seats on either side of her, and she looks up at him.

He buys a small popcorn and lets her pick at it, throws away whatever’s left. 

He remembers the last time they were like this, saw a movie together, a week or so before she left. He’s not sure which one - they’d kissed so much he hadn’t even watched, had slipped his hand between her legs, her stifled moans playing underneath the score. He hadn’t known it would be the last. 

She shifts next to him, crosses one leg over the other. He doesn’t think she remembers, but he can’t help but wonder if she’s thinking about it too. 

She spins around to face him when they’re out on the street. 

“Nightcap? I know a place up here.”

Dan swallows, manages to nod his head.

He’s surprised how easy conversation still is with her. They move from Hitchcock and Selznick to Henry’s horse riding lessons to Nate’s new girlfriend, younger than the one before but whom they both agree will last half as long.

He’s found that she’s still the same girl he loved (past tense, he reminds himself), even under the weight of that second last name hanging over her head. His little ship of Theseus, her parts replaced with metal casting, the cells he’d touched all those years ago all gone now, dead and made into dust. Under the lights of storefronts, the ring catches his eye. She fidgets with it as she talks, spins it around and around. It had broken him when he saw it, back when he loved her (past tense, he reminds himself). It still breaks him a little now, too. The headlights of full cabs and flashing strobes on the fronts of bikes feel like watchful eyes. Dan keeps his hands stuffed in his pockets.

Blair comes to a stop as a doorman carries bags out onto the curb, then turns inside. It’s a hotel bar, busy, the kind of place Dan used to feel out of sorts in but are now the only places he ever really frequents. The dive bars in Williamsburg have all shuttered their doors, or the patronage seems to be getting younger, more vibrant and alive. 

He orders an Old Fashioned, then waits. He had learned Blair’s tells long ago, from long nights spent rummaging through the lofts liquor cabinet - back when he got to taste it on her lips, back before that when he could only offer her a shoulder to cry on. Wine when she was happy, gin to get through the night, whiskey before sex or when everything hurt. It doesn’t surprise him that he still remembers. He remembers everything. 

Blair takes a seat at the bar, orders the same.

“I like this,” she says, her fingers picking at the sleeve of his cable knit sweater. “It’s fancy.” She runs her hand on it, up his forearm, the sleeve riding up to reveal his watch. 

“Oh,” she says, looking up at him. Her hand is still on him, fingers curled around his bicep. “You’re a sell out.”

He chuckles. “I’m a hypocrite.”

“You had to grow into it eventually,” she says, then removes her hand, places it back on the shined wood of the bar. 

“Does it hurt?” she says. He sets down his glass, taps his finger on the rim. “Your hand.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “Itchy.”

“Only you would have a Rolex but not an electric kettle.”

“It’s vintage,” he mumbles. “The watch, not the kettle.”

“Like the car,” she says. “Did you drive here tonight?” He shakes his head. “That’s too bad. We could’ve gone around the block.”

Dan lets out less of a laugh, more of a startled noise. She mimics his motion, taps her pearl-pink nail on the side of her glass, the sound lost in the din of the bar. 

“It’s nice,” she says. “The watch, not the car. Really nice. Did she buy it for you?”

 _She_ as in _Serena_ as in _his_ _wife_. She’s there this week and then she’s back, and then she’s gone again. Back and forth - the Paramount offices in New York and the film’s production in Los Angeles. Back and forth - with him and not with him, the way it’s always been. 

“I’ve got my own money,” he says. _Sometimes people still buy that fucking book I wrote about you._ “You want another one?”

She smiles, hopping off her stool. She’s right there, if he were to turn now she’d be pressed against him. 

“Sure,” she says. “I’m going to freshen up. Don’t go anywhere.”

He gives her a half-smile, barely there, his heart rushing too hard to think properly. She’s gone for a while, and although he doesn’t want to think it, he can’t help but worry that she left. 

And then she’s there, sliding back into her seat, drinking down the fresh cocktail.

She sets down her glass, rim of whiskey and the orange peel lying at the bottom of it, the back of her hand resting against the back of his.

“If I were to ask you,” he starts slowly. “Hypothetically, if you left that magazine in your kitchen there for me to see, what would you say?”

“Hypothetically,” she says. “I would say yes.”

He brushes his knuckles over hers, up and down, something like a shock running through his spine. 

“If I were to ask you, if you wanted to get a room upstairs, what would you say?” she says, and then, “Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically,” he says. “I would say yes.”

“That’s good to know,” she says. 

She steps off her chair again, and this time she does brush against him, her hand lightly down his arm, then gone.

“1218. I’ll meet you there.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

She smiles, but it doesn’t quite meet her eyes.

“I don’t think I can wait that long.”

He watches her retreat through the crammed bar, until the back of her head is lost to the sea of people. It takes everything in him to not physically bite down on his fist.

The elevator is as slow as it could be, every ding making him brace himself. He fiddles with his watch, takes it off and pockets it, weak in the knees and trying not to overthink all this. 

He knocks softly and the door opens, the room dark inside. Their first time had been in a hotel. They were able to laugh about it after, the bad sex and the code names and the fact that she was married. 

The door shuts behind him, and she’s there, and she’s kissing him before he can even fully realize it. She’s pulling him down and pushing herself up at the same time, her fingers flexing into his back, anchoring him to her. Maybe she’s had this dream, too. Maybe she’s afraid he won’t really be there when she opens her eyes, too.

They stumble in the dark until they hit the bed, Dan taking a seat on the edge and pulling her into his lap. She withdraws, brings her hand up, not breaking his gaze, and pulls the ring off her finger. She holds onto his shoulder to steady herself, leaning over and setting it on the bedside table. He does the same. 

“Careful,” he says. “Hand.”

She nods a little, pulls his sweater over his head, pressing kisses to his chest. He untucks the covers from the bed, tugs down the zipper of his jeans, the zipper of her dress. And then she stops. 

“I don’t look the same,” she says quietly. “I don’t look like before.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “You’re still you.”

He runs his hands over her breasts, down her stomach, hip bones jutting into his palms, his touch faltering when he passes over the long divot across her skin. She’s slick when he touches her, his fingers slipping into her easily. He groans, almost like he’s in pain. Maybe because he is.

“How long...” he buries his face in her hair, teeth grazing just below her ear. “How long have you been like this?”

He doesn’t see her smile, but he hears it in her voice.

“All night.” 

He knows she means it. She doesn’t say things just because he wants to hear it. She never did. 

He kisses over her jaw, her neck, her collarbone, doesn’t keep his mouth in one place too long as to not leave a mark. It’ll be over and it’ll be like it never happened. Just like before. 

She pushes him hard against the headboard. _Fuck_ , he groans, that pained noise trapped in his throat. Her eyebrow quirks up. In the dark, she still looks like that girl. The Queen of Constance. 

Their bodies click back in place, his name escaping her in a drawn out moan. Her nails bite into his shoulder, scratch along his face, open mouths bumping against each other. At some point, his legs start to prickle, falling asleep, and he wraps an arm around her waist to flip her over, the bed making a suspicious noise under the weight of them. 

Her face scrunches up, the way it did when she laughed at his jokes, and he kisses, kisses, kisses her. She sounds like she hasn’t gotten it like this in a long time. He doesn’t like it, that that’s the thought that makes him come. 

She shoves his arm lightly, letting out a sigh, and he rolls off her. 

“I need -“ she sighs again. Dan could listen to that all day. 

“What?”

“Water,” she says. He laughs, kissing her again, before peeling himself out of the bedsheets and grappling around for his underwear. 

The bathroom tile shocks him, cold against his hot skin, and he smacks the wall clumsily, feeling for the light switch. He catches a glance of himself in the mirror, eyes unfocused, as he fills up a flimsy plastic cup. Red lines form down his chest, over his cheeks. He looks startlingly young, after having been told over the past year how old he looks for his age. Guilt clouds him like steam on the glass, and then it’s gone. 

“I’m paying for the room,” she says. “You could have at least gotten a bottle out of the mini fridge.”

He rolls his eyes, moving to turn away, but she takes the cup before he can, drinks it down in one go. He covers them back up with the duvet, revelling in the warmth, keeping his eyes closed for a moment, just feeling her breathing next to him. She brings a hand up to cup his face.

“You’re so handsome,” she says. “But you’re different.”

“I’m still me,” he says. She smiles, draws a finger under his cheekbone, along the line of his beard.

“I miss the long hair,” she says, reaching up to twist a finger in a curl. He raises his brows.

“You hated it when I had it. You literally bullied me into cutting it.”

It’s not entirely the truth. He’d cut it after she left, another trivial desperate ploy for her attention. 

“You don’t know what you have ‘til it’s gone,” she says, then falters. “I like this though,” she scratches at the coarse hair on his jaw. 

“I wish we could just stay like this,” he says. “Forever.”

“That’d be hiding.”

“I don’t think so,” he says. “Just a different kind of living.”

“I shouldn’t stay,” she says. “The staff will wonder if I don’t come home.”

He walks his fingers up her arm, then around onto the back of her shoulder blade, charting the constellation of beauty marks and barely there freckles. She was right, she didn’t look like the last time he saw her like this. Stretch marks lining her breasts, the scar from her c-section like a split across her stomach. He still remembers staying up all night, waiting for Serena to come home from the hospital, waiting to know that she was okay. There they were, the cracks Dan had always seen in her, the cracks he had made a home in, tried to fill with himself but never succeeded. 

But she’s not all that different, he thinks. She’s still the girl he loves. He’d remember her if she never touched him again.

“Blair,” he says, once she’s dressed and at the door, and when she turns around with an expectant smile, it makes his heart skip a beat. He nods his head, gestures toward the bedside table. In the darkness, the diamond doesn’t glint. She takes the few steps back, slips the ring on silently. 

* * *

_There’s a call for you? An Arthur Campbell?_

“It’s me,” Blair says, hushed and conspiratorial. 

“Mr. Campbell,” he says, matching her tone. “You sound different.”

“My husband would be chafed to know you’re flirting with me.” It takes a moment for the joke to settle in, and she interrupts his small, breathless silence with a quick - “I’m calling to take you up on that lunch date.”

Dan had become accustomed to the shallowness that permeated the conversations at cocktail parties, event luncheons, charity brunches, had garnered a fluency in bullshitting his way around trust fund babies and housewives and men who should probably be in jail for something or other. Staying on the outskirts, he’d found himself a harbour for wives who had no real friends, no one to talk to, who’s already thin façades wore off fast with a few drinks. Serena didn’t mind. Blair was never one of them. 

And then. 

He orders her a salad and a plate of fries to share before she gets there, his suspicions proven when she tells him in a huff that just a coffee would’ve been fine. 

Conversation with Blair isn’t shallow, never has been, but he gets the idea she doesn’t have anyone to talk to - so he sits back and listens, speaks up when he thinks she wants him to. 

She fishes through her bag, pulling out a deflated white tube.

“Here,” she says. “For your hand.”

“Mom to the rescue.”

She chews through a bite of her salad begrudgingly, points her fork at him.

“You know what I didn’t tell you?” she says. “That doll you gave him? His father threw it out after you left and I dug through the garbage for it while Henry cried.”

“Why do you say it like that?” he says. “Like he’s not my brother-in-law.”

Blair frowns around a fry, taking a glance over the crowd of suits and ties surrounding them. 

“Look at all these people,” she says. “All in a rush. No one sees us here. No one knows what we’re doing.”

“What are we doing?”

“We’re having lunch,” she says. 

He gestures for the cheque, leans forward and sets a hand on her knee under the table. 

“As friends?”

“Of course,” she says. “We have to be careful.”

“None of this is careful, Blair.”

She’s on him before the door has a chance to fully lock, tugging him down with a fistful of his hair - he’d already called and cancelled his upcoming trim. 

“Ow, fuck -“ he pulls away, a hand going to his lip, a drop of blood coming away. “You’re gonna eat me alive.”

“You need - to use - chapstick,” she says between kisses, metallic and messy, like she can’t get enough of him. Maybe because she can’t. 

“Pick me up,” she says, and he does, hoists her up by the thighs and moans into her mouth when her legs fit around him. He missed having her so much, despite all the times he told himself he didn’t. And he thinks, from the teeth marks she’s leaving on his neck, her nails digging through the fabric of his shirt, blunt but determined enough to rip, maybe she missed him too. 

He sets her down on her back on the bed, tugs her skirt and his pants off, not bothering with the rest of the clothes, just wanting the relief of being inside her. She braces her hands on either side of his face, kisses the bitten spot on his lip softly. He still tastes blood.

She keeps kissing the bite, over and over, mumbling a stream of words he can’t quite make out until - _it’ll be so much worse this time._

“What?” he says, but kisses her before she can answer, not really wanting to know.

“We have to be careful,” she repeats. “We’re going to fall in love again.”

He falters, open mouth hovering over her. Her eyes are so big, staring up at him.

“Just because I never said it doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.”

He groans, pushes up into her a little too hard, but she gasps, nodding. _Again_ , she says, and he does, pulls her top away, a button popping off, pulls her hair out of its bun, just pulls, gives himself more of her. Maybe this is all he’ll ever get. 

“I don’t understand,” he says after, curled up like two kids under the covers, and he’d meant to say You at the end, but knew that wouldn’t be true. Although Dan hasn’t been telling much of the truth lately, swallows it down and lets it make him sick to his stomach. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?” 

“What?”

“When we were in love,” he says, past tense. 

“The timing was wrong,” she says. He supposes she hasn’t been telling much of the truth lately either. 

“You don’t love him.” Not a question - a statement. 

“I do,” she says. “I always will. I have to.”

Dan leaves it at that. Just having her here, her head heavy on his chest, is like snipping away at stitches on an unhealed wound. 

Before they leave, she insists on putting the cortisol cream on his hand for him, rubbing lightly over the raw skin. The touch of a mother - healing in nature, reminiscent of scrapes and bruises from his childhood. He doesn’t remember the last time he saw his own.

Blair touches his lip with a pout. “Sorry I hurt you.”

* * *

“You look like hell,” she says when he walks in, tripping over her discarded heels by the door.

“Feel like it too,” he says, loosening his tie, her nose wrinkling when she kisses him. He smells like smoke. He’d snuck a cigarette on the way over. It’s a process. “I need another early morning meeting like I need a hole in the head.”

“Tell me about it,” she says, shifting her legs up so he can take a seat on the bed, then resting them back in his lap. He pushes his thumbs into the arches of her feet, muscles yielding at his firm touch. She hums, closing her eyes.

 _I could do this for you every day,_ he thinks, digging the words into the flesh and burying them there. _I’d wait for you to come home every day like a hungry dog at the door instead of going into that fucking office and pretending like I don’t hate my life._

She sighs. 

_He could’ve done this for her when she was pregnant_. He jams his thumb up too hard on the ball of her foot. She jerks away, then settles back with another sigh. The thought cuts at the cords of his heart like a shard of glass. He’s lost feeling in his hands. 

He brings her foot up, kissing the sharp bone of her ankle, another over a small bruise on her knee. He lowers himself, pushing up the silk of her slip and pressing kisses to the soft skin of her stomach. He hovers over the expanse of her scar, not sure if it’s crossing a line she wouldn’t appreciate. He decides against it, spreading her legs instead. 

He looks up at her as he kneels. Maybe this was all his fault. Maybe she was tired of being a prayer mat. Maybe he drove her back to being a stomping ground. 

The skin of her hip is thin under his lips. She’s all sharp edges now. He urges her thighs further apart, spreading her open, tasting her. She lets out a low moan, his head tilting up, eyebrows raised, smiling.

“Get rid of whatever smug look you have on your face,” she says, eyes still closed. “And get on with it.”

He does, his tongue working over, finding the lost rhythm she liked. Her nails dig a little painfully into his scalp, her back arching, pressing herself into his mouth, until he can feel her thighs shake and seize under his hands. _Don’t stop,_ she says, and he doesn’t. He runs his thumb over her inner thighs, tender and red, little bumps raising in her skin from the friction of his beard. He kisses the spots, hears her sigh.

“Been a while,” she says. She doesn’t specify whether she means since the last time he’d done it, or in general. He doesn’t actually remember the last time. Maybe he didn’t remember everything. Maybe it was easier that way. “You were always good at that.”

“My pathological need to please,” he mumbles, resting his cheek on her chest, rising and falling with heavy breath.

She laughs, gripping his hair and tipping his head back to kiss him. “He’s self aware now.”

”Let me make you feel better,” she says, hand under his chin, urging him up. He already does, did the moment the door of the room clicked shut, the mechanical beep of the lock securing them into this world alone - full, vibrant colour where everything outside is dark and drab.

She pulls at his collar, kissing his neck, then bites down, her mouth turning up into a smile when he lets out a low noise. She slides her hand down, biting again, running her tongue over the teeth marks - it’ll leave a bruise, probably, and he’ll have to figure out what to do with it. “Come on, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

Dan’s not so sure that’s true.

They fuck for the better part of the day, the sun setting early, dark blue seeping over the city like spilled ink. She leaves first - she always did, does, will. 

None of this is easy, but washing her off him is the hardest part. He scrubs at his nails with the small bar of hotel soap, lemon balm and patchouli eroding away the scent of her on his fingers. The hot water feels raw on his new skin, the blisters on his hand healing slowly, dead skin coming off in patches. 

  
  


* * *

There are rubies draped around her throat like a red slash against her pale skin. His mug of coffee had nearly shattered to the floor when he’d turned the news on earlier that morning and saw them - saw her - with a hand on Chuck’s back. She’d winced when he kissed her cheek, invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent years studying every twitch and turn of that mouth. Dan reaches out, runs his fingers over the diamonds gingerly, like they’re an open, tender wound.

“Careful,” she says. “It’s a gift.”

There’s purpled marks just under the jewels, giving away to sickly yellow splotches, like the diamonds aren’t real at all, like they bled and rusted on the canvas of her skin. She smells bitter, something he faintly recognizes, sour and expensive. Dan grits his teeth.

“You slept with him?”

He gets her dress unzipped, her fingers fumbling with the button on his jeans, her mouth on his neck. 

“In the backseat of the car before he left,” she says. “I didn’t finish. He’s so gullible.”

Dan doesn’t think it’s that. Dan doesn’t think he cares.

She pulls him into the shower, grappling for the handle, washing off all the powder, hairspray, the smell of stale cologne. 

“I saw you,” he says. “On TV this morning.”

“Yeah?” she says, in that wanton way she knows drives him crazy. “Did I look pretty?”

“So fucking pretty,” he says, voice hoarse.

She laughs inside a gasp as he pushes into her, her fingers pressing into the skin of his shoulders hard enough it feels like they’ll leave a dent.

“I was thinking about you, could you tell?”

He couldn’t, but of course, he had hoped.

“Do you like that? That he couldn’t make me come and I had to wait for you to do it?”

She’s teasing him, but there’s something underneath it, it doesn’t land right. It’s not like it was then, too much time having passed, too much between them now, too much on the line.

What he wants to say is _Why do we still have to play these games._ What he wants to say is _Leave him and be with me again._ But the water beats hot on him, steam all around them, her tongue flicking insistently on his. So he only says _Yes_ , and presses himself deeper into her. 

She comes out in a plush white robe, the marks on her neck in almost the shape of the necklace itself, places on her skin where Chuck’s mouth must have sucked, the way Dan had seen him suck on a piece of ice from a glass. He doesn’t like to think about the way Chuck must touch her, always too full of himself, always more interested in the idea of loving than the act of it. 

“Room service?” she says, picking up the menu from the desk and looking it over. “Do you think they’d give me breakfast for dinner?”

Dan shrugs. They’d give her anything if she used her real name. 

He flips through the channels, sixties sitcom reruns and nightly news. He freezes, rubies cutting through the screen. She holds a hand up, watching the self that isn’t herself, a version of her that’s been carved out and propped up for display. 

“I look fat,” she says, lowering her hand. He switches the channel.

“You’re perfect,” he says, knowing she’ll roll her eyes. She does. 

She sets her ring on the dresser next to the rubies. She hadn’t taken it off before the shower, less diligent than him about removing the evidence of a life outside this one. 

“Do you remember the tiara?” she says, her back turned to him. She knows he remembers. “I threw it out. When we were moving. Chuck didn’t know what it was and I didn’t want to explain.”

They’d moved into the new house six months after they married, once the marble had been chiseled and the windows had been set and the floors had been waxed, a museum to display their undying love in. If Dan had known then that she’d kept it that long, he would have counted it as a win. 

She climbs onto the bed, curls into him like a cat, scratching at the hair on his chest. He flips back to find the Gilligan’s Island theme song, lets it play to fill the silence. It reminds him of being eight, nine, on the couch in front of a staticky TV screen, Jenny’s bony arms and legs curled in his dad’s lap, a big hand on her tangled hair. The TV broke and they threw it away and never replaced it. _You’ll grow up and I’ll grow old and you’ll fall in love, and I don’t want it to hurt you the way it hurt me,_ the memory of his dad’s voice after one too many beers is as full of static as the television set. Every love of Dan’s life started and ended and existed almost totally there - that expanse of brick walls and vinyl records and worn in couches. They broke and he threw them away and could never really replace them, any of them. Carved out and propped up replacements. Dan thinks his childhood home is more a graveyard than anything. He’s not even sure who lives amongst the tombstones anymore, how many new pairs of feet have walked over the bones of every love he’s ever known.

Something passes over the room server's face when Blair opens the door. Faint recognition, probably. Her face had flitted across screens in living rooms and Times Square alike for years now. Dan lets himself revel in it, the flushed glow of her face, the way the mans eyes shift past her, seeing him on the bed, his hair still wet. 

_My pleasure, Mrs. Rose,_ he says as he shuts the door. 

Dan raises his eyebrows, Blair matching him, a small smile as she bites into a piece of toast. 

Toast and waffles and a bowl of fruit and wine. Dan is walking a dangerous line.

“So we’re married.”

Statement, not a question. Blair shrugs, turned toward the cart. She hands him a glass without looking at him, deep red. It tastes expensive. There’s more - _What did he have that I didn’t? We could’ve gotten married, could’ve had kids, could’ve had a home. It could’ve been me, so why wasn’t it?_

She drips maple syrup over her plate. The wine stains her mouth, a pink wound opened up in front of him. The rubies stare at him from the dresser, beady red eyes watching his every move. It’s no use now. Maybe it’s too late for anything more than this. 

When he flips through the channels again, another familiar fake smile startles him on the screen.

“He’ll need to get married,” Blair says, barely having to look up, recognizing the voice of her first boyfriend on the television. “If he wants to run for senator.”

“He doesn’t even want to run for senator,” Dan says. “The foundation is enough.”

“Nothing’s ever enough for them,” she says. She stares up at the ceiling, her face slack, unreadable.

“Chuck doesn’t know about the IUD,” she says. “In the car he said - he said he wants another baby.”

She sighs, not the sweet post-sex sigh, something heavier, something like trying to lift a weight.

“I don’t think I could ever do it again. It was horrible. I was so scared every day. I didn’t do anything - I hardly went anywhere.”

Dan remembers, he hadn’t seen her for months. Serena would leave for hours on end to look after her, come home irritated and tired. There was a small part of Dan that thought Serena wanted that baby more than anyone. It would be a definite divide. There would be no way back.

“I knew that if anything happened to the baby, he would blame me. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if it happened again. But he did his best. He tried to comfort me, but that’s never been something that came naturally to him. He’s not you. And you... I would think about you. I was alone and I wished you were there, like you were before.”

A tightness stretches through Dan’s chest, filling up like water in his lungs, making it hard to breathe.

“When he came early, I was so afraid. I thought - I just wanted him to be okay, I didn’t even care what happened to me. Then there he was, and he was okay, both of us were, and you never even came to visit.”

Dan brings his hand off her, rubs at his eyes. His broken promise of _Always_ had hung over his head, but he’d willed himself to not feel bad about it. There had been no reason for him to be there - not when she wouldn’t even look him in the eye. When he lowers his hand, black dots spot his vision, and then she’s there.

“Serena doesn’t want kids,” he says. “At least not now.”

“She never did,” she says, and then, “She always thought she’d be a bad mother.”

Dan considers this, then spites himself, not because he thinks it’s true, but because he considered it in the first place. 

“I’m a bad mother,” Blair says.

“That’s not true.”

“I wanted him so much before I had him. And now I look at him and I just don’t feel anything. He’s going to hate me when he grows up.”

“Don’t say that,” Dan says. “My mom left and I don’t hate her.”

“You’re you,” she says. “Your dad had human feelings.”

Dan doesn’t laugh - jokes at Chuck’s expense aren’t funny anymore, not when she’s going to leave tonight and slip back into the tomb they share.

“And these stomach aches,” she continues. “He complains about them all the time. And he’s always fighting. He cries so much, so much more than a kid his age should be. There’s something wrong with him.”

Dan wonders if he really did succeed in filling her empty spaces, enough so that a child born with none of his blood would still feel the things he felt - the things he still feels. 

“It’s not surprising, with the men who came before him,” she says. “Anger passed down through the bloodline.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he says. “It’s not too late for him to be different.”

She picks his hand up and rests it on her stomach, lays his palm flush on her scar.

“You’re always so nervous,” she says. “It’s not like it’s going to split open.”

Sometimes Blair’s bluntness hurts, but it’s the kind of honesty she only offers to him. What hurts more might be that Dan can’t offer it back. He had given her everything, laid it all out for her taking, and she’d thrown it away. Even after all this time, even with his hand pressed to the ridged skin, he can’t bring himself to say the things he’s thought for years, that made him fear he was an awful person.

“There’s a man in California,” Dan says as Blair slides her ring back on.

“Oh,” she says. “She told you that?”

“No,” he says. “She doesn’t have to.”

“Like you don’t have to tell her there’s a woman in New York.”

“That’s not what you are.”

She hums, like she knows but it’s irrelevant.

“Chuck has other women,” she says. “One in every zip code, probably.”

She turns just as she leaves, puts her sunglasses back on even though it’s well into darkness now.

“Let’s get a room with a bath next time.”

* * *

The neckline of her dress cuts deep, gloves up to her elbows, all black except for the rubies at her throat.

Dan shouldn’t have come, although he hadn’t had much choice in the matter. He spits his gum into a cocktail napkin - brandished with the Bass name. He needs a fucking cigarette. 

He watches her under the spotlight, that as seen on TV smile. Mechanical and accommodating, every move meticulously practiced. Her mouth moves at the microphone and it’s like there’s no sound, staticky transmissions cutting through the white noise. _The perfect husband,_ she says. _The perfect father._

Chuck’s hands are greedy on her waist - his triumph, his trophy. When he smiles out into the crowd, it looks so real, Dan almost believes it is. 

( _I’m yours_ , she would say, _Tell me I’m yours,_ and he would, raspy and not all there. He was never possessive before her and he still isn’t after. But the time in between - the time that was her - wrapped up silk sheets and her perfume, punctuated by fresh fruit bowls and the morning paper, by the nights he’d said _You’re mine -_ they had gone by so fast that during them he had never stopped to think about what he was doing. Blair had wanted to be owned and he couldn’t give that to her - couldn’t let her give herself up to him.

But she’d said it - _I’m yours_ \- and he’d believed her every time, as unbelievable as it was. But then came the heat of summer without her, the torture of the days after with only walls between them, the years that had gone by when she was merely a mirage he saw on weekends at glittering cocktail parties and stupid fucking Sunday breakfasts. And Dan had time to think, then, that it was never true, that she’d never meant it.)

She finds him, crammed between people, her tightrope walk of a stance not letting up. He gestures to the bartender, orders her a gin and tonic. 

“Hold the tonic,” she says, smile tight, eyes straight forward. She wraps her lips around the rim of her glass, and peers up at him.

“Nice suit,” she says, slightly muffled but he hears it. “You wear that for me?”

He shrugs. “Quite the speech you gave.”

“It’s working,” she says, ignoring him. “I want you so much right now.”

“Not here,” he says. “It’s too dangerous.” 

She tilts her head, nods behind her at nothing.

“You’re going to go home and fuck her.”

“I thought we were past this,” he says. Sometimes, Blair reverts back to that mean little girl who took the hurt inside her out on other people. Dan is in love with her. 

“He’s already wasted,” she says. Serena is too, but he doesn’t point it out. She tips her head back, takes down the rest of her gin in one go. “I would like to come at least once tonight.”

He wants that, too, wants to kiss the crease between her brows and have her relax her shoulders and hear one of those little sighs, the ones he knows are reserved just for him.

“We have to be careful,” he says. The corners of her mouth turn up. 

“Where were you?” Serena says from the passengers seat - because Dan is now the asshole who drives a roadster in New York City. Dan is now the asshole who cheats on his wife at parties. 

“What do you mean,” he says flatly, flicking the turn signal, the continuous click the same rate as his heart. 

“I lost you for a bit there,” her voice is knowing. His blazer smells like perfume. 

“I was at the bar,” he leans forward in his seat as they stall in traffic. Serena hums, low in her throat, eyes trained on the rain running down the window.

* * *

They sit across from each other at dinner, at the kind of restaurant where every conversation is played out in yells over the loud din. He doesn’t say much, just sits back in his seat and tries not to laugh. They sit around - Nate in from a job in D.C. he hates with another model who he’ll be done with by the next time he comes around. Chuck who treats his home, with his wife and his child, like it’s a layover between business trips, who’s only the perfect husband and father when he wants to be. Serena pretending that she isn’t restless, that her high school sweetheart of a husband still loves her - all of them, these not-friends, acting like they’re normal. This is the line that they walk: they still do this because of all the history that they share, but they pretend that the history doesn’t exist. 

Blair watches him over the dim candlelight the whole night. 

* * *

The lock buzzes and she comes in, a long double breasted trench coat with a tight tie cinching the waist, her hair curled in wisps around her. She takes off her sunglasses, although it’s mostly cloudy outside. She puts down her things on the large wooden dresser, going off about traffic and parent-teacher meetings. She pulls at the tie on her waist and it opens up, unravels, reveals her in a corset and stockings underneath. It’s sheer over her breasts, down her sides, stark black against her pale skin. Dan’s stomach turns. He’s in love with her. 

She pushes him down onto his back and takes a seat in his lap, hair falling around them, an ivory tower looming over him. She takes his hand, runs it down her, presses it between her legs. 

“I’m so wet,” she breathes, rubbing herself through the fabric with his hand. “I’ve been so wet all day thinking about you inside me.”

“Blair,” he says, and there’s something in it that makes her stop, let go of his wrist immediately. “I don’t want this.”

He places a hand on her side and tries to shift out from under her. Her forehead creases, watching him, and then it sets back in place. There’s a flicker over her face, distantly familiar, an old light switch being turned on. 

“Does it make you feel dirty?” she says with that sardonic twist to it, the one he’d hated and then loved and then hated again.

“I don’t want all of this, it makes it feel like -“ he stands up, his hand on her shoulder to steady her as she bounces off him and onto the bed. 

“You don’t want it because you know I wear it for him too,” she says, voice dark, and his hand retracts like it’s been burned again. “And you don’t want to share.”

“I’m not him,” he says, almost a laugh, quick and bitter. 

“No, you’re not, because you always need to feel like the good guy, and how can you be when you’re fucking another man’s wife.”

“I’ve done it before.”

He stops, reaches his hand back out to her, and when she winces, it shatters the tension in him completely. He lowers himself onto the floor in front of her. 

“This isn’t us,” he says, but it is - this particular fight, spanning the years. _You knew you could do better than me. I’d rather end up alone than with you._

“You’re not supposed to make me feel like shit,” she says, in a voice that tells him that the spark that had been lit a moment ago was already gone, that he’d blown out that little flame. “That’s his job.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It came out all wrong. You look perfect.”

She covers her face with her hands and he pries them away, runs a thumb over her cheek. 

“I know,” she says. “I know what you meant. The hotel rooms and the fake names and -“ she sighs, gestures roughly to the coat lying on the dresser. “It’s tawdry.”

He slips his hand into hers, and she makes a halfhearted attempt at pulling him up. When he takes his place next to her, she settles her head on his shoulder.

“It’s just that - I was so angry at you,” he says. “After everything. I was angry for a long time. After that I was just... empty. But sometimes I still feel it, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

“I was angry for a long time, too.” she says, but that much he knows. She didn’t speak to him directly for a year after the last phone call. It was three before she called him Dan again. “And then I just started to forget to be. Or maybe I was tired of carrying it around.” And this he knows too, or he had assumed, or maybe hoped, that first time she said it, _Dan_. She was getting him to pass her something. She was getting his attention. She didn’t know she already had it. Or maybe she did.

“I haven’t given Serena anything,” he says. “Just a name and a ring. No part of myself. And it feels like it doesn’t matter, because she hasn’t looked at me in years. I don’t remember the last time it didn’t feel like playing a part.”

“It’s what she wanted,” Blair says plainly. “She wanted you at any cost.”

“It wasn’t one sided,” he says. He means that night. He means all these years. “I wanted to want her. Because it meant not wanting you.“

“I was tired of it always being him,” he says. “The first time you kissed me and the last. Always him and never me. But I’ve loved you the whole way through. You’re the best thing to ever happen to me.”

“I was only ever myself with you. I play a part, too. And I liked who I was when I was playing my part, much more than I ever liked myself.”

She turns up to face him, tears like dewdrops on her porcelain skin. 

“It’s a love story. Him and me. It has to be.” she says. “Because if it isn’t then I did it all for nothing. But I think about it all the time. I would’ve been a completely different person if I’d let myself love you.”

“There’s still time,” he says. “It’s not too late, Blair.”

He watches as she fidgets with her ring, a string tied around her finger, holding her captive to a story.

“No,” she says. “It’s not too late.”

* * *

They have sex in her office just the once. He comes bearing coffee and croissants, licks the chocolate from her mouth as he fucks her on her desk, the skyline watching them through open windows. There’s tears in her eyes when she finishes, collapsing against him with a sob, black clumps bleeding onto his shirt. He wipes away the smudged mascara, kisses her like she’s the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted. Maybe because she is. There’s a bouquet of red roses in a glass vase waiting for her outside, a small monogrammed card typed out by some uncaring secretary stuck on top. It’s Blair’s birthday. 

* * *

  
  


“I was thinking about what you said,” Blair says, steam rising up around them. They’d gotten a room with a bath. “About Henry. Do you know where his name comes from? It’s what he went by when he thought his life was going to change. I took it as a promise. But I think it was a memorial.”

Dan watches a bead of water trail down her arm, running his finger over the invisible track left behind. 

“He wanted to change. He did. But maybe he never really believed he could. And now he’s made it someone else’s problem. An extension of him, destined to be as bad the rest. But maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s not too late to change that.”

“Blair?” Dan says, suddenly very serious. There’s something in the way she’s focusing on her fainting manicure that has him worried. “Has he ever hurt you?”

“No, not like that.” She taps him on the forehead, water dripping off her hand. “Don’t frown. You’ll get wrinkles.”

The water’s too hot for him, and the perfume of the bubble bath is too strong, and the tub’s barely big enough for the both of them. But Dan doesn’t care. He’s in love with her.

“You know what else I think about sometimes?” she says. “The baby. She’d be eight now.”

“ _She?_ ” Dan muses. 

Blair shrugs. “I wanted a girl.”

”So do I,” he says. “I think about her.”

He’d been ready then and he’s ready now. Here he is again - retching out his heart for her on a silver platter, feeding it to her with a silver spoon.

“I wish Henry was mine,” he says, so quiet he’s not sure she even heard him. “I wish you’d had my kid.”

Her mouth turns down, a little crease between her brows. He brings his hand up, smoothes it down with his thumb.

“But then he’d be forced to watch those awful old sitcoms,” she says. “And his hair would be frizzy.”

He smiles, running his hand down her arm.

“I’ll treat him like my own,” he says. “You know I will.”

“I know,” she says. “At least now he can hate us both when he grows up.”

He gives her a look, a silent, nagging _stop that,_ but she doesn’t see it, eyes on their hands as she presses the tips of their fingers together. Dan’s hand has healed, not even a ghost of the burn left behind. 

* * *

Blair doesn’t take her jacket off when she arrives, even though the thermostat’s been on high in anticipation for her coming in from the cold. 

“What is that?”

She tugs her sleeve down, holding up a finger as she finishes up the phone call she was on when she came in. The artificial sweetener in her voice doesn’t match her appearance in front of him.

“Blair,” he says, once she’s dropped her phone into her bag. “Show me.”

She stays still for a moment, then pulls her sleeve up, almost irritated. A chain link of purple bruises bracelet her wrist.

“It’s nothing. He came home and I was tired but he still wanted to - It’s fine.” 

Heat rises up Dan’s neck. He takes a seat on the edge of the bed. His stomach aches.

“It’s not anything I haven’t dealt with before,” she says, and his skin prickles at the resignation in her voice. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing when he’s doing it.”

Dan thinks about the gifts, her wincing, the long gloves at the party she wouldn’t let him take off. He clenches his hands into fists and keeps them in his lap. 

“I think he does,” he says. “I bet he gets off on it - I bet he likes it when you don’t want it.” 

“Don’t say that,” she says. “He’s an alcoholic.”

“So is Serena,” he says. “She’s never hurt me.”

The sentiment hits him like a blinding, white light. He looks up at Blair, her eyes big, and it brings back that tightness in his chest. 

“I already called my lawyer yesterday,” she says. “He won’t know until it’s all sorted. Which could take weeks.”

She does shed her jacket then, tossing it on the bed. He catches her hand before she can sit, pulling her into his lap and wrapping his arms tight to her waist, burying his face in her neck. Her breathing turns shaky.

“The contract was constructed by his lawyers,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t have signed it. It’s not like he was going to leave me if I didn’t. But he never trusted me. He took me out of one prison just to put me in another.”

She runs a hand through his hair, sighing. 

“It’ll be the cover of every major news outlet,” she says. “I’ll need a good outfit for court.”

* * *

Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy when she comes in. He jumps off the bed, arms coming around her, hands already searching for marks. She pushes him off, ducks her head and pulls out her phone.

“Did he do something?” he says, and her nose wrinkles a little. She holds her phone out, the screen reading _Voicemail_. She taps on the speakerphone. There’s a stretch of crackling silence, then Serena’s voice comes through.

_Dan told me everything. I never want to see either of you again._

He takes a seat on the bed, buries his face in his hands.

“She didn’t pack up my shit and throw it on the curb,“ he says. “I thought it went well.”

( _I’m going to ask you a question._ The candles on the coffee table were lit. There were tears in her eyes. _And if you’re not honest with me, I swear to you that when I leave this weekend I will never come back._

A tear streaked down her cheek, and the pantomime that lived in him had thought about wiping it away. 

_I bet you’ve just been waiting to do that_ , he’d said, quick and feigning exasperation. 

_Don’t do that to me,_ she said. _Who have you been seeing?_

 _Tell me, Dan. I have to hear you say it_.

Wax dripped over onto the table, searing a spot into the wood. Before the name had even left his mouth, he knew they would throw the table away, and never replace it.)

“You didn’t tell me you were going to do that.”

“I didn’t exactly plan on it.”

“So I guess there’s no man in California.”

“There is,” he says. “She told me there is. And you know what’s funny? The guy has a fucking kid.”

Blair takes a seat next to him, her hand on his back, between his shoulder blades.

“She just didn’t know that it was you.“ 

It’s not entirely the truth. 

“She did it to me twice,” Blair says. “Now she knows how it feels.”

Dan isn’t sure that it’s the same thing, but he was one of those two, so he lets her have it. 

“You said that to me, too.” Blair says. “ _I never want to see you again._ You said that on the phone that night you called.”

“I don’t remember that,” he says. “I was drunk. I didn’t mean it. I wanted the opposite.”

“I don’t think that’s the case this time.”

Blair looks up at him with swollen eyes, and he’s reminded of a dark grey hall a lifetime ago. He hopes, for her sake, she’s wrong. 

* * *

“Chuck knows it’s you,” she says quietly. “I told him.”

Dan’s upgraded from a room to a suite, some sick sort of irony sweating through him when he walks through the lobby after work. For the first time, Blair’s brought an overnight bag.

“What did he say?”

She shrugs.

“What you’d expect. That I made a mockery of him, that I’m throwing my life away for a low rent loser, that he’d rather have Henry have no mother like him then have one who’s a whore.”

Dan grimaces, pulls her head against his chest. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should knock the shit out of him again.”

“Don’t joke,” she says. “Only I can joke.”

“I’m not joking,” he says. “Will he... will he use it against you to get custody?”

“No,” she says. “He knows he’s done worse.”

She tips her head up, and he recognizes the little pout - the look when she wants him to kiss her. He doesn’t keep her waiting.

“So what now?”

“I’m going to London to see Jenny,” he says. “She wants me to meet her girlfriend.”

Blair’s eyebrows knit together just a bit, a small questioning smirk. He shrugs, kisses her forehead.

“Did you tell her about _your_ girlfriend?”

“I wanted her to meet her,” he says. “Again.”

“Henry has been overdue to spend the holidays with my parents,” she says. “Christmas in Paris is essential at a young age for healthy development.”

Dan laughs. “Is that where I went wrong?”

“One of many ways,” she says, mumbling against his lips. “But it’s not too late.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Title from Snow and Dirty Rain by Richard Siken.   
> As always you can find me on tumblr at mysteriesofloves.


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